Artifex Software is pleased to announce the release of Ghostscript 9.56.1

NOVATO, CA April 6, 2022 – Artifex Software, Inc. developer of Ghostscript is pleased to announce the release of Ghostscript 9.56.1. Artifex is a trusted developer, partner, and provider of core technologies that drive print, file conversion, and document management solutions. We provide essential software tools to major printer manufacturers, SaaS and Cloud developers, and PDF tools/creation companies.

Changes to the PDF Interpreter

For the past several years, the Ghostscript development team has been working on a “from the ground-up” rewrite of the PDF interpreter. The new PDF Interpreter code is now enabled by default in Ghostscript 9.56.1. The old interpreter can still be accessed and used but only for the short term.

For more information about this significant update to Ghostscript, please see our blog post.

Highlights for this Release

In this release, the new PDF interpreter is now ENABLED by default in Ghostscript, but the old PDF interpreter can be used as a fallback by specifying -dNEWPDF=false. We’ve provided this so users that encounter issues with the new interpreter can keep working while we iron out those issues, the option will not be available in the long term. This also allows us to offer a new executable (gpdf, or gpdfwin??.exe on Windows) which is purely for PDF input. For this release, those new binaries are not included in the “install” make targets, nor in the Windows installers.
Calling Ghostscript via the GS API is now thread safe. The one limitation is that the X11 devices for Unix-like systems (x11, x11alpha, x11cmyk, x11cmyk2, x11cmyk4, x11cmyk8, x11gray2, x11gray4 and x11mono) cannot be made thread safe, due to their interaction with the X11 server, those devices have been modified to only allow one instance in an executable.
The PSD output devices now write ICC profiles to their output files, for improved color fidelity.
Our efforts in code hygiene and maintainability continue, as does the usual round of bug fixes, compatibility changes, and incremental improvements.

Please note: Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.56.1 bundles zlib 1.2.12 which addresses CVE-2018-25032.

For more information, please see our Release Notes.

Download Ghostscript 9.56.1

For over 25 years Artifex Software has provided premier document solutions to top-level global customers. As the developers of Ghostscript and MuPDF, our world-class rendering and conversion technologies help you build better, faster, more robust products. Develop superior print and document management solutions with Ghostscript’s customizable features, comprehensive conversion capabilities, …